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Situation: Ambiguous

Rarely has a photo revealed so little while evoking so much. It shows an intent President Obama and other officials in the White House Situation Room, but tells little about what exactly the situation is, except that they are watching something off to the left.

The picture was taken by the chief White House photographer last Sunday, when they were monitoring the deadly raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan — and the expression of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton stands out. She holds her hand over her mouth and appears, what? Shocked? Awed? Dismayed? She is what the French critic Roland Barthes called the “punctum,” the not necessarily conspicuous detail that gives a photograph its emotional resonance.

But Mrs. Clinton has said she does not recall what they were watching, and attributed her hand-to-mouth gesture to allergies. For all we know, the officials might have been watching a ballgame.

Had President Obama decided to release pictures of Bin Laden dead, maybe this ambiguous image would not have become as iconic as it did, for it falls short of what photography, at its best, historically has been thought to do: present the truth.

Yet that is what makes it so riveting, especially given the changing official narratives of the raid. It is a strangely enigmatic coda to the hunt for Bin Laden. And it would be hard to think of a more telling image of the elusiveness of truth in a democracy’s fraught struggle with terror.